In the first part of SCCM 2012 and SCCM 1511 blog series, we will cover SCCM installation prerequisites most specifically hardware requirements, design recommendations and server prerequisites.

Hardware Requirements

The hardware requirements for a Primary Site server largely depends on the features that are enabled, and how each of the components is utilized. When the number of clients grows and changes, the server hardware requirements change accordingly. For the initial deployment, hardware requirements can be estimated for each server by determining:

The overall need for each component (Will you do Operating System Deployment ? How many daily software deployments ? Is Inventory and reporting is important for your organisation ? Will you manage Internet Client ?)

The number of clients planned to be installed

The load on each of installed SCCM components

In general, medium environments (couple thousand clients) should consider the following recommendations when planning hardware:

SCCM and SQL Server communicate constantly. We recommend that the main database and SQL Server be installed on the Primary site server. This is fully debatable and we understand that some organisation try to standardize their SQL distribution. Performance are simply better using a local installation when configured properly

Neither the SCCM site nor the SQL database should share their disks with other applications

Configure the SQL Server databases and logs to run on a different disk than the disk where the SCCM database is located.

Another issue to consider when determining hardware requirements for a site servers is the total amount of data that will be stored in the database. To estimate the required database size for a single site, an approximate figure of 5Mb to 10Mb per client is typically used.

In our setup, we will install a single Primary Site that has the role of Management Point, Reporting Point, Distribution Point, PXE Service Point, State Migration Point, Fallback Status Point and Software Update Point. SQL Reporting Services will be used to provide consolidated reporting for the hierarchy. This role will also be installed on the SCCM Server. Running reports can have an impact on server CPU and memory utilization, particularly if large poorly structured queries are executed as part of the report generation.

Disks IOs is the most important aspect of SCCM performance. We recommend to configure the disks following SQL Best practice. Split the load on different drive. When formatting SQL drives, the cluster size (block size) in NTFS must be 64KB instead of the default 4K. See the previous recommended reading to achieve this.

Letter

Content

Size

C:\

Windows

100GB

D:\

SCCM

200GB

E:\

SQL Database (64K)

40GB

F:\

SQL TempDB (64K)

40GB

G:\

SQL Transaction Logs (64K)
SQL TempDB Logs

40GB

Primary Site server prerequisites

Once your hardware is carefully planned, we can now prepare our environment and server before SCCM Installation.

Active directory schema extension

You need to extend the Active Directory Schema only if you didn’t have a previous installation of SCCM in your domain. If you have SCCM 2007 already installed and planing a migration, skip this step.

Logon to a server with an account that is a member of Schema Admins security group

From SCCM ISO run .\SMSSETUP\BIN\X64\extadsch.exe

Check schema extension result, open Extadsch.log located in the root of the system drive

Create the System Management Container

Configuration Manager does not automatically create the System Management container in Active Directory Domain Services when the schema is extended. The container must be created one time for each domain that includes a Configuration Manager primary site server or secondary site server that publishes site information to Active Directory Domain Services

Start ADSIEdit, go to the System container and create a new Object

Select Container

Enter System Management

Set security permission

Open properties of the container System Management created previously

In the Security tab, add the site server computer account and Grant the Full Control permissions

Click Advanced, select the site server’s computer account, and then click Edit

In the Applies to list, select This object and all descendant objects

Click OK and close the ADSIEdit console

SCCM Accounts

Create the necessary accounts and group created before installation. You can use different name but i’ll refer to these names throughout the guide.

sccm 2012 r2 installation prerequisites

Founder of System Center Dudes. Based in Montreal, Canada, Senior Microsoft SCCM Consultant, 4 times Enterprise Mobility MVP. Working in the industry since 1999. His specialization is designing, deploying and configuring SCCM, mass deployment of Windows operating systems, Office 365 and Intunes deployments.

Hello, in Part 1 5.6 (Firewall Configuration) you mention that you should run “this” script in elevated command prompt in order to open the necessary ports needed in SCCM. Where is “this” script? It immediately goes to 5.7.
Please advise.

Your guide is truly top notch! Could you comment on how the install occurs in an environment where the ads schema is NOT extended? I’m certain that it can work but not certain what additional steps or configurations are needed for this scenario to work.

• Your link to report viewer is to a French Microsoft page and is for report viewer 2010… shouldn’t we be using a newer version?
• You don’t list how to install wsus 3.0 sp2 and shouldn’t we be installing wsus 4.0?

Neat guide, I’ll be using it to upgrade our system from running on a 2008 R2 server to 2012 R2.

But I have a question in regards to the disk requirements. We use a similar setup on our primary site (though with the SQL on it’s own server) and our D: drive is currently using 750GB+. The server is not set up as a DP but it still seems to have a copy of all our packages and applications (which is A LOT, with many big CAD programs).

Is this normal and should we just make the new server with 1-1.5TB, or are we doing something wrong?

I’m looking to do a fresh install of SCCM 2012 R2 SP1 so that I can migrate our current setup that’s running on Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server 2008. I was planning to do the new install on a Hyper-V server that I have available. The Hyper-V storage is local and is setup as one big RAID10 on SATA disks. Do I still need to create the additional 5 disks for the Hyper-V server (as per your recommendation), or do I just install everything on single disk?

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